by Jerrold Ladd
And we children didn’t just receive our whoopings at home. Some of us were beat in our front yards or in the middle of a street. I hated the beatings that woke me from my sleep. It was difficult enough going to sleep. As I had, some children had been made to take their whoopings standing wet and naked after leaving the shower. It borderlined on torture.
A redneck white family owned a store where sons of the owner wore guns like wild cowboys and charged ludicrous prices for everything. So everyone shopped at the nearby shopping center, which had two grocery stores, a Laundromat, and several department stores. Cigarettes were too expensive at the redneck store. They cost a mere dollar and five cents at the Tom Thumb. So I took the hidden trail along the lake to get there.
Along the trail, a route I would walk a thousand times, I tossed pebbles into the calm lake, which was maybe a half mile long and wide, with cattails and shrubbery growing along its edge. The trail veered down near the water, where snakes lounged in the cotton trees and bushes. After getting back on the concrete of the street, I entered the shopping center, which had a parking lot the size of a football field. Walking around the crowds on the sidewalk near department store facades, I mentally prepared to see Syrup Head at the Tom Thumb. She was there every day.
She eased toward me like a shy little girl. “Do you have a cigarette?” she would say, nothing more, nothing less. Her hair looked like a swarm of termites with creepy, ugly kinks in it, and she never wore shoes on her crusty feet. People in Elmer Scott who knew Syrup Head said heroin had driven her crazy when she was young.
She used to live in the George Loving section, which was so foreign to me that it could have been another country. She had been a fierce fiend: first cigarettes, then weed, then heroin. On Rupert Street, in Edgar Wards, she had openly sold her body simply to share someone’s dope, even as a teenager, and desperate men who wanted cheap sex had abused her that way. But one day she had threatened to call the police on a dealer after he refused to give her credit. Wanting to get rid of her, he had laced her heroin capsule. Now, in her thirties, she remembered only her very first chemical habit, cigarettes.
Three Finger Willie was also at the Tom Thumb that morning. He had been given this nickname because his left hand had three fingers missing. He looked like a pencil with a black wig where the eraser should have been. People rumored that he was an ax murderer. He would stand in front of the store, swinging at invisible objects. I dreaded going to the store when he was there; the thought of dismembered and mutilated bodies, especially mine, horrified me more than any shoot-out. I avoided him and bought the cigarettes.
While my mother lay on the living room couch, smoking her cigarettes, I fixed a bowl of rice, being careful to rinse all the roach eggs from the bowl, and a glass of water. There was nothing else to eat. When she was done with her cigarette, my mother came into the kitchen.
“I’ll be back in a while. Wash those dishes up. Tell Sherrie I said to cut up and fry that chicken.”
“But, Momma, it’s not my time to wash dishes,” I argued, as I always did, even when it was my time.
“I said wash those dishes. Now shut up talking back.”
After she left, I heard the usual rumble that signaled my brother’s approach. I looked out the back door. He was making his daily rounds in his shopping basket. Several kids had squeezed under the blanket.
“Junior, go tell Sherrie Momma said to come cut this chicken up.”
“You go tell her,” he screamed back. He hurried around the corner and was gone. I began to wash the dishes.
Another sink full of pots and pans, roach eggs and roach wings. I dreaded this. Every day that’s all my brother, sister, and I did was wash, scrub, and slave for Momma. These were not ordinary chores a woman would give her child. One thing about my mother, heroin made her want the entire house cleaned, meticulously, from top to bottom. Whenever she was high, the cleaning came before everything, eating, doing homework, even sleeping. If one of us went to bed without washing dishes, he or she could expect to be awakened: with a belt, shoe, extension cord, stick, broom, lamp, or fist. “Wash out Momma’s panties, massage Momma’s neck.” And if I said no, the cool words “Do it for Momma” and “That’s Momma’s baby boy” did me in every time. Kindness was so rare.
When she wasn’t high, the dishes usually would sit in the sink for weeks. The kitchen was creepy. The rusty shelves, where sewage plumbing stuck out, were filthy. Our pots went there. Too many roaches and rats, alive and dead, were under there, too. No matter how hard I tried, I just never could get all the grime, chicken skin, and food from the pots. So I let them sit filled with water on the cabinet. I was taking a chance because if she came back disappointed, I would get a whooping.
To find Sherrie, I walked over to the next unit, where her friend Teresa* lived. Her family was a replica of my own, with a brother, a sister, and a heroin momma who slaved her like my mother did my sister. Knocking on the back door, I called to Sherrie, “Momma said come and cut the chicken up.”
“Dog, she make me sick, always running off and expect me to cook. They ain’t my kids,” she said when she came out, referring to my brother and me.
She always acted rebellious around Teresa; but I knew she didn’t mean any harm toward us. She came anyway.
“Teresa, I’ll be back later,” she said. I walked ahead of her, giving her privacy if she wanted to whisper some stuff.
Onward our lives went during 1977 and 1978, still our first or second year in the projects, washing roach dishes, running from bullies, cutting up chickens. Around then, my mother started having men come over and stay in her room. She usually came from in there high, and after several months of her lying, claiming they were only friends, I put things together. I really knew the truth when I heard women say my mother shouldn’t do that in front of her kids and heard kids call my mother a bitch to my face. I let her think I was ignorant, though, so that she could preserve her dignity. But I despised every man that came over to take advantage of my poor mother. I let them know it, too, through looks, snarls, frowns, and much later with fists and knives. The ones who stayed awhile, some weeks, some months, earned my respect.
Most of the time, though, the men would not stay. This meant that there constantly was a different man as a father in our lives. You can imagine how confused we became as children. The minute we adapted to the new one, he was replaced by another one. For women like my mother, there was an unspoken rule that said you had to take the kids along with the woman. Some of the men would feign interest in us to adhere to this. Others she saw were really sincere, I think.
Of all the men she would meet, I was most impressed with Pie. He was short, thick, and wore a beard. Since he was from Oak Cliff, a black neighborhood south of the projects, he knew little about project life. Even though he was in his late twenties, he still lived at home, where we visited only once. His mother hated the idea of him being with a woman who had three kids.
But my mother, regardless, still could attract a good man. So, eventually, he moved in and became our father. Pie quickly took responsibility for teaching Junior and me during the few months he lived with us. He taught us how to make up our beds, fold sheets, and sort laundry. He made sure we got up on time to go to school. He would sit me under his arm, where I could watch my heroes, the Dallas Cowboys, play football—every TV in the projects would be tuned to the Cowboys’ games. At the first meeting of father and sons, he introduced us to personal hygiene. Afterward I was so excited I took a bath with Comet and washed the tub out with soap. He had meant vice versa.
The one and only Christmas that Pie spent with us, he woke Junior and me up early Christmas morning. “Get up, boys,” he said in his plain, reserved way. “I have something to show you.” I figured he had gotten us some of those Salvation Army green, wooden toys, the kind every child knew and hated, so I wasn’t all that excited. But Pie had done more, had gone to the limits to make us happy. He held his hands over my eyes, while burying Junior’s face in his
hip, and guided us down the stairs. Once we made it into the living room, he uncovered our eyes and let us take a look. When my vision adjusted, I saw the hottest toy that year, a cops-and-robbers racetrack, which Pie had already assembled on the hard tile.
“So you think y’all a be happy with that?” Pie asked, smiling. Then, as Junior and I dove for the track, he let out a hearty laugh, the first and last one I ever heard from him. Since it was still six in the morning, we played until we fell asleep, sometimes Pie joining in, right there on the floor. He would leave us at times to help my mother put the finishing touches on the big Christmas meal we would gorge on later. In time our sister woke and began feverishly to unwrap her new clothes and games. Later that evening, my brother and I walked around the house looking like we had swallowed bowling balls, from the three or four plates we’d eaten.
But there was only so much Pie could do for us in a couple of months before things turned bad. Money eventually came up missing, valuables misplaced. Pie and my mother often got into shouting matches. One day she threw a glass at him as he stood at the bottom of the stairs; that event marked the end of their relationship. He moved out a week later. If Pie had stayed, he could have helped us become one of the minimum-wage families.
But other men, I learned in 1978, were out just to take advantage of a weak, unschooled woman. It didn’t matter, though; every new man she had we called Daddy. That’s how bad we longed for a father figure, then, at our young ages. None of them was worth a damn. Some of them I despised. One of them, Charles*, hit her, a woman, in the face.
It happened after the project authorities transferred us to another unit, so that they could remodel the former one. By then her temper had become so bad that she would scratch and claw the men when she became upset. Charles, who lived with his mother several blocks away, was in his early twenties. He had been visiting our bare apartment often and locking himself away with my mother. One day, while I stood in the door and watched, she and Charles wrestled in her bedroom. She tried to pick his eyes out. He angrily pinned her to the bed and tightly gripped her neck. Suddenly he reached back with his right fist and slammed it into her face, twice. She let out a high-pitched wail. Before I could react, he darted past me down the stairs and fled through some empty apartments.
She lay there holding her eye and moaning. Then she turned toward me and pointed. “What kind of a son are you, stand there and let your momma get beat up? Get out! Get out!” she screamed.
I ran to the kitchen, got the biggest butcher knife I could find, and ran after Charles. But he had disappeared.
I wouldn’t see him until years later, when I was a young teenager carrying guns. I saw him walking, though he didn’t recognize me. I was finally gonna give him what he deserved, a bullet in the head for busting up my mother. He wouldn’t know where it came from. My anger was building as I followed him for two or three blocks. I was about to shoot him, in broad daylight. But grace was with him that day, because I simply changed my mind and went the other way.
In only those two years, my mother had become completely fettered by the projects. She had turned into a complete drug addict and whore, and her addiction had reached a higher level. Her arm was swallowing up pills like quicksand. Odds were if we stayed around the house, we would get a whooping. My brother never cared about these odds, since he was always the first one up and out. Until school started, he would just push his buggy all day and not come home until nightfall. His plan had worked fairly well; only once or twice did grotesque Biggun chase him home. Nothing was at home anyway. We had gotten down to having jelly-and-syrup sandwiches for dinner.
At home, I wasn’t too concerned with my mother, either. She couldn’t fuss at who she couldn’t find. Since she hardly came in my room, since she never came among that filth—it probably would have killed her—I just stayed in the closet. When she called my name, I would ignore her. I would sit in there all day, fighting off the insects and remaining motionless if she stuck her head in the bedroom door. I enjoyed the total darkness in the closet, away from most of the noise, the dope, and the fussing. That closet, my sanctuary, my friend. I would just daydream in there, sometimes thinking about my dad, hoping he would come and visit us. But he didn’t, not once.
From the closet, I would also keep the window open, in case I heard the other kids rounding up everyone for a game of Deadman. I would wait until my mother went inside her room, then dart out the door. One evening, only weeks after we had started starving in that Hitler camp, only months after men had started seeing my mother, a special game of Deadman got under way.
“Who-all wanna play Deadman?” one kid asked.
“Ooh, I do.”
“I do, too.”
“Go and get Chris, Mark, Ke-Ke, Donkey, Ping Head, Big-gun, and his sister Scootie,” and another dozen children, which was easy because we were so many and because everyone loved Deadman. All frictions, all jealousies, left when we played Dead-man. It seemed sacred. Moreover, we children were too anxious because of the excitement about to happen. For Deadman was a complex game, full of ways in which the players could be entrapped, ensnared, eliminated, or become a Deadman. It was just like living in the projects.
Huddled close together in a circle, like a crowd trying to stay warm in a winter storm, everyone held his fist at chest level. Ping Head, Biggun’s brother, used the counting technique to determine who would be the first Deadman. “I struck a match and the match went out.” (Whoever’s fist he stopped on would lower that hand.) One person dropped a fist. “I struck a match and the match went out.” Another person dropped a fist. This continued until one of Biggun’s fists remained. Since he was the only person with a fist still held up, he was the Deadman.
He had to catch and touch the other children, who, in turn, would help him catch the others, until the last person was captured. This person, whose fists never remained after he had finished counting because of the counting formula, would huddle everyone up and count again.
An entire project block of twenty-four buildings was the area where the manhunt took place. It was getting dark, the best time for playing because it wasn’t so hot. Across from my unit stood two vacant, vandalized buildings—in a few spots throughout a project block would always be several vacant units. All the windows had been broken out of these. Glass, nails, and pieces of Sheetrock were everywhere. Holes had been kicked through the walls so that a man could walk through each apartment or could crawl or hide in the ceiling. It looked like a construction site.
Biggun stood outside the circle of people, waiting to touch anyone who tried to run. In time, one person dashed away. When Biggun took off after her, the whole circle scattered in all directions. The acrobatic youngsters headed toward the ghostly project buildings, while the sprinters stayed in the open space. The others went to find hiding places somewhere on the vast project block.
I climbed the tree that grew in front of a vacant project unit, our Deadman play area. Eric, a kid who loved this game, dove through a window. His mom and dad worked for dope dealers, and he was terrified of staying in his house, since many parents who worked for dope dealers were being found shot to death inside their apartments.
Biggun dove out the window behind Eric; but Eric was too quick for him. Several others whom Biggun already had touched ran after Eric as he ran back inside the building. The whole spectacle was open to me from the tall tree I was sitting in, which was in jumping distance of the two-story roof. Playing Deadman, I would jump onto the roof if someone climbed up the tree behind me. If they had the courage to follow me, I would hang from the roof and drop to one of the ledges, then jump from it and escape through the building. When Biggun climbed the tree, I jumped. After running through the project, I blasted down to the other end of the block to get far away from Biggun.
Deadman, all the kids loved to play it, all the adults loved to watch it. They would set chairs outdoors to watch the game for hours. Ms. Betty, Mrs. Burnese, Ms. Brown, loved to see the kids scare the hell out of th
em by jumping from two-story buildings or doing flips through windows. Sometimes even the dope dealers would watch. One-arm Nathan*, whose arm had been amputated, a man who kept his dope in a medicine bottle hidden in nearby bushes, in a crack between the sidewalk, or in his empty sleeve. Or Messy Marvin (before he was murdered in a hotel room), who had a big house in the suburbs with a gun collection in his living room.
I thought I had outsmarted Biggun by running to the other end of the block. It was getting dark, so everybody else was staying near the vacant units, near people and the older boys. I ran between the two units where we had lived, now vacant on the other end of the block. Biggun’s figure was gaining on me. Evidently I hadn’t gotten around the building fast enough. I increased my speed, preparing for the slide move. Just as Biggun was upon me, I faked the slide; but he didn’t go for the bait. He grabbed and threw me to the ground. He was going to get his revenge for my outsmarting him with his own trick earlier, despite the sacredness of the Deadman game. With his knee in my back, he grabbed for my pants, and tried to pull them down. What the hell was Biggun doing? I wrestled onto my back and looked into his face. He wasn’t Biggun. He wasn’t one of the Deadman children. He was a rapist.
I screamed for help from that little dark spot between two tall project buildings, screamed until the rapist got scared and ran off. He probably knew the projects were too crowded, knew the dope fiends stayed too busy. He knew if the dope dealers heard my screams, they would have stomped him until every drop of life drained from his body.